You might be looking for "Entity - Component - System" design, common in video games. Entities are still virtual-world objects like you might expect, but none o

You might be looking for "Entity - Component - System" design, common in video games. Entities are still virtual-world objects like you might expect, but none of them would dare keep track of something like their position or temperature or whatever. Instead, they register a component with the appropriate system, which keeps all the data colocated for efficient physics and the like.